Syndication

October 11, 2005

The utter silence of Terri's autopsy

The body of Terri Schiavo was whisked to the coroner's office on March 31 within hours of her succumbing to 13 days with neither fluids nor food after Pinellas County Circuit Court Judge George Greer ordered her feeding tube removed and barred oral nutrition and hydration.

Nearly 11 weeks later, Pinellas-Pasco County chief medical examiner Dr. Jon Thogmartin confirmed Terri Schiavo died of "marked dehydration," even though he listed the exact cause of death as "complications of anoxic encephalopathy," or brain damage. He declared Terri's heart to be strong and estimated she would have lived another decade if not for the feeding-tube removal.

But of course that itself was the very reason the worshippers of death wanted her killed. Those who see the killing of the inconvenient as a necessity, cannot abide those who will not die. It is the ghouls' attitude that regardless who loves a person, as long as their existence annoys at least one person and their capacity is in any way diminished, then it is their duty to die, and if they won't, then they must be killed. Lying to the press, who more often than not don't care for being reminded that there are less than perfect people, is acceptable, as is lying in autopsy reports.

Just as a statistical correlation between two events is useless in establishing a causal connection, so the fact that a medical finding is "consistent with" a diagnosis is virtually meaningless in establishing what precisely the diagnosis might be.

The only really meaningful way to use the term is in excluding a diagnosis, in those cases where you can determine that the laboratory or autopsy findings are "not consistent with" such-and-such a diagnosis. Here the negative is of use in establishing either: (1) the data enables a given etiology or diagnosis to be "ruled-out" or excluded; or (2) through an arduous process of elimination, all known "consistent with" alternatives may be excluded, leaving only one as the presumptive explanation or cause for purposes of making the diagnosis.

Nearly 100 per cent of the time, when physicians say that a given test result, autopsy finding or other piece of data is consistent with a given diagnosis or determination, that very same finding is also "consistent with" a different, or even directly contrary, conclusion.

To say that a decedent's fractured skull is "consistent with" murder does not lend any substantive support to the notion that the decedent was murdered, since the same fracture may be, and often is, "consistent with" the contrary conclusion that the decedent was not-murdered (for example, fell and hit his head).

Applied to the Terri Schiavo case, when the ME states or implies, for example, that his findings were "consistent with" her having been in a PVS for many years prior to her death, every single one of those findings was equally "consistent with" the conclusion that she was not-PVS prior to her death.

When the scientific and medical data is equally consistent with both x and non-x as in the Schiavo case, then it is utterly meaningless to suggest, as the ME appears to have implied (predictably leaving the liberal mainstream news media to infer) that the data supports or establishes one or the other as true. Something meaningful has been said only when the physician or the ME can use data to "rule-out" something, by finding that the data is "not consistent with" such-and-such a diagnosis, or cause of death.

In other words the autopsy revealed nothing, therefore the worshippers of death conclude that in the absence of any evidence that they were wrong—they must be right.

One has to wonder if they would choose the same rules of evidence if it were their own execution being decided.

Posted by Danny Carlton at October 11, 2005 06:10 AM

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